Civil Designer: Civil Engineering & Infrastructure Design Software

CAD is an add-on module to Design Centre to give you the full functionality of AllyCAD, our fast, powerful and very easy to use computer aided draughting program. The CAD module includes all the drawing functions listed under the Design Centre plus all the additional functionality that a full-time draughts person could wish for. Macros further allow you to create customised functions, or to use functions developed by other users.

AllyCAD is an industrial strength 2D CAD that has established itself as the best of it’s breed in South Africa, Europe and the United States. The program is intuitive to use and is rated as one of the most user-friendly CAD packages on the market. As a core focus, we strive to give you essential functionality combined with operational simplicity to increase your productivity. You can also graphically customize all menus and toolbars to your liking.

AllyCAD places all the draughting functionality that you need at your fingertips, allowing you to design the way you want to! Our included toolkits further enable you to complete many time consuming tasks in just a few seconds. In short, we have designed the program to work the way you do, intuitively and naturally.

Most CAD systems in the industry do not take into account that the art of technical drawing and illustration relies heavily on finalizing the details of the item that you are designing while you are working on it. It is very rare that you know all the details and dimensions of the object or component when you start. With AllyCAD’s construction lines, the layout and the details resolve themselves in your mind and on the screen as you go along. This allows you to focus on the design and not on using the software.

While many CAD systems places a vast arsenal of snaps and cursor moves at your disposal, they usually force you to draw the way the programmers draw and not the way you would draw naturally. This is the reason why we include geometry lines in AllyCAD.

Geometry lines are a superset of construction lines. They allow you to define the layout, position lines and arcs tangential to each other and defines the basic layout of the drawing elements. You can thereafter simply fill in with solid lines to create the objects.

AllyCAD is one of the fastest Windows CAD packages available. It outperforms (10-20x) the speed of the competition, on redraws, snaps, and loading of drawings. Most importantly, there are no regens!

We have spent hundreds of hours analyzing computer aided design and draughting methods, and have developed an optimised command system that places the most common operations within one keystroke or button click. In addition, the Control Bar dramatically cuts the number of user responses for much faster editing and drawing so that you can complete complex tasks quickly and easily.

With AllyCAD you can open multiple drawings at once and use the Windows clipboard to cut and paste between the drawings. You can also add drawings to other documents by simply copying the portion of the drawing you would like and pasting it into the document.

When it comes to compatibility, AllyCAD fully supports the reading and writing of AutoCAD's DWG format, DXF, Caddie CEX, Arcview SHP and ASCII files. This gives you the flexibility to move between drawings without having to worry about incompatibilities and data exchange problems.

In addition to this, AllyCAD handles JPG, TIFF and BMP files and also supports TFW, LOG and HGR geo-referenced bitmaps.

We have developed a number of specialised toolkits that allow you to complete many time consuming tasks in a matter of seconds. All toolkits come included in the CAD module of Civil Designer. Full information about the functions in the toolkits can be found on our AllyCAD website.

	The General Toolkit contains essential and innovative functionality - each of the tools are designed specifically to make your life easier and save you hours of time.
	The Architectural Toolkit speeds up many of the activities that are used to draw building plans such as the design of stairs, internal and external walls, roof lines, cross sections, elevations... etc
	The Survey Toolkit allows Surveyors to effortlessly generate Survey General diagrams and General Plans. You can also import, export, add, locate and connect survey points.
	The Mechanical Toolkit helps you to rapidly draw bolts, screws, nuts as well as drill and tap holes at any specified angle by simply clicking on the line the fastener must align to.
	The Structural Toolkit draws hot and cold rolled steel sections easily and rapidly lays out building grids with centre lines and grid labeling as well as column bases.
	The Civil Toolkit draws cut and fill bank lines between any two lines or arcs, and helps you to draw a sewer or stormwater network quickly and easily.

The general functions allow you to set up functions and drawing element parameters.

	SETTINGS Cartesian, Surveyor, Southern or Northern Hemisphere coordinate systems. Metric, Imperial or user-defined units.
	CUSTOMIZATION User-definable menu and toolbar. One-key shortcuts, powerful and easy macro language with over 450 commands.
	BILL OF MATERIALS Create Bill of Material lists with a single command. User-defined items and layout allow you to customise the output.
	DIGITIZER Support for most popular digitisers as well as a generic ASCII input stream where you configure your own format.
	INPUT Import, scale and position drawings in the current drawing. Read and write AutoCAD DWG/DXF, Caddie CEX, ArcView SHP and ASCII.

	ELEMENTS Elements include points, free and chained lines, rectangles, equal sided polygons, arcs by three points or radius.
	TEXT Select any TrueType font. Add text balloons and bubbles around one or two lines of text with auto-numbering and frames around text.
	DIMENSIONS Define dimension parameters such as pen, witness lines, arrow style, font... etc. Associative dimensions with tolerances.
	HATCHING User-defineable hatch patterns and solid fill with 16 million colours. Auto perimeter tracking with rectangular, circular and polygon islands.
	SYMBOLS Select from over 1500 symbols with the ability to create your own symbols. Drag a symbol with ghosting.
	BITMAPS Display multiple large bitmaps, handle JPG, TIFF, GIF and BMP. Supports TFW, LOG and HGR geo-referenced bitmaps.
	GEOMETRY Geometry entities allow the precise layout of complex shapes and allow you to create an outline from composite construction.

The edit functions let you change existing drawing elements and manipulate them in a number of ways.

	EDIT Move, rotate, repeat, copy, paste, remove, divide, join, snip and measure selected entities with a simple click and drag operation.
	SELECTIONS Allows you to specify detailed selection filters for a combination of lines, arcs, circles, polylines, data items, text, colour and solid fills.
	OBJECTS This allows you to group, show and list objects in a particular layer with a specific name or parent name.
	JUMPS AND SNAPS These functions allow you to jump or snap to a specific object or entity within your design such as an arc, circle, mid-line and intersections.